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Civic engagement

The strength of Counting New Beans is in its impressive list of contributors. Through interviews, artistic leaders engage in conversation about audience, community, and the value of art. Beyond these thoughtful essays, the book includes the...

The documentary film “Waiting for Superman” reignited the debate over the quality of public schools in America. At the request of the Ford Foundation, the Harmony Institute completed an evaluation of the social impact of the documentary film....

Understanding how knowledge moves through communities can help evaluators select the components of a program that are best suited for scaling up. “Scaling” is the practice of replicating programs for implementation at new locations, by other...

In this article, author Alan Brown revisits and interprets the 2005 report, The Gifts of the Muse, published by the RAND Corporation and commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, with valuable analysis of how public value occurs from the core artistic...

The Boston Youth Arts Evaluation Project (BYAEP) Framework responds to the need for an evaluation model that considers the combination of education, youth development and social services outcomes and that does justice to the beauty, complexity and...

Sparkwise, a new kind of digital dashboard developed by design and innovation firm, Tomorrow Partners, uses visually compelling platforms to share the stories of impact of films and visual media. Measuring the impact of films and visual media is...

Cultural organizing exists at the intersection of art and activism This paper explores the power of cultural organizing with examples of groups and individuals placing art and culture at the center of organizing strategies: organizing from a...

In this paper, Lyz Crane draws on the work of practitioners and researchers to characterize the field of arts-based community development in which arts and culture can help achieve place based change related to the physical, social, and economic...

The modern-day arts-based community development movement is founded on the belief that the arts can be a powerful agent of personal, institutional, and community change. Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the movement has grown from a very small and...

From an environmental perspective, we are living in transitional times; the practices we engage in now have far-reaching implications for the survival of the earth and all its life forms. “Environmental Art” is an umbrella term for a wide range of...

A growing number of colleges and universities are expanding and deepening the role that publicly engaged scholarship in the humanities, arts, and design can play in contributing to positive change in the communities and regions within which higher...